3-30-09

Our web folks receive HTML emails from clients that do not render properly in Outlook 2007. This is a known issue & there is a work around.


(Background from the internet)

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007.

The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are described in detail in the article, but here are a few highlights:

no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
no support for forms
no support for Flash, or other plugins
no support for CSS floats
no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
no support for CSS positioning
no support for animated GIFs

In short, unless your HTML emails are very, very simple, you’re going to run into problems with Outlook 2007, and in most cases the only solution to those problems will be to reduce the complexity of your HTML email design to accommodate Outlook’s limited feature set.

(Solution from the internet)

Outlook 2007 does have a way to render an e-mail using the built in browser (security-zone).
The method is:
1) Open the E-mail in it’s own window (double click)
2) Click the toolbar button called “Other actions” in the ribbon
3) Choose “View in browser”

source:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/